Missing Reels (19 page)

“And when we got there, people were all over everywhere, from the studio, from the film, some creditors, I didn’t even recognize most of them. Creepy little nobodies Emil wouldn’t have let past the front walk when he was alive. Going through papers, going through his desk, telling me things would have to be sold. They were looking for a will, and it turned out he didn’t have one. Why should he, he wasn’t even forty.

“They were already piling things in the entrance that they thought would bring some money—a couple of paintings, his suits, the case where he kept his watch and his ring. I wanted to take those but I knew they’d notice. I walked to his bedroom, which was all the way in the back of the house. He’d kept a print of the movie, the original version before he’d had to cut it. He had it in a cabinet, and I opened it up and looked at it for a minute and I thought about taking that. I wish I had. But I didn’t know how to get it out, and I didn’t have a way to watch it, anyway. I looked at his nightstand and saw a picture I’d given him, and I took that. I thought … I wasn’t thinking very clearly at all, but I thought I’d be able to come back and get something else when they were done. It never occurred to me it might be my only chance. When I went back the next day, they told me the house had been seized, along with the contents.”

They sipped water for a minute, and Ceinwen’s remorse swelled once more as she stared at the empty coffee cups. “I should let you go.”

“What? You can’t possibly. This is the most important part. This is where I tell you life goes on.” Miriam was, incredibly, smiling. “So. Life …”

“… went on.”

“That’s what I was going to say, but then I realized that’s a lie, because it didn’t, not for a while. I stayed home. For months. The market crashed, we lost money, and I barely noticed. We lived on the last of my paychecks and tried to save. Mother, if you can believe it, wanted to go back to Milwaukee. I’d finally won. Except now I didn’t want to leave. It felt like deserting Emil. We moved into a cheaper place, and finally I looked around and realized it was possible to starve in sunny California, and Mother and I were about to prove the point. So we took in sewing, for a couple of years. But times got hard fast, and having your own dressmaker was one of those things people were trying to do without.

“But now, come to think of it, I do have a star story for you. Exactly one. Are you ready?”

“Let’s hear it.” She hoped that squeak in her voice didn’t make her sound too starstruck.

“Norman had been doing well for himself, helped us make rent a few times. He was always good to his friends. He showed up one night and insisted on taking me to dinner at the Cocoanut Grove. And it was as awful as I thought it was going to be. Hollywood failure, you reek of it. Nobody wants even an accidental whiff. I went to the powder room, just to get away, and this beautiful woman was in there, primping. We’d met at a couple of parties before
Mysteries
was released, and she said hello, didn’t scamper away or pretend she didn’t recognize me. She complimented my dress. I said I’d made it myself and she told me how elegant it was, like something from Paris, and wasn’t it wonderful I could sew like that. She asked if I’d ever considered doing it for a living, and I said I was trying, but it wasn’t exactly steady. A couple of days later I got a call from the wardrobe department at MGM, and they said they’d been given my name, and asked if I was interested in seamstress work. I went over and spent a few days showing them what I could do, and they hired me. I worked there until 1947.” Miriam waited. “You’re tired, Ceinwen. There’s an obvious question here, and you’re not asking it.”

“What question?”

“The woman was Myrna Loy.”

All she could say was, “I’ve always loved her.”

“Me too, dear. Me too.” Miriam checked the clock and moved to the edge of the sofa. “I suppose that really is it. Unless you want to hear about how to sew fake breasts into an evening gown for a flat-chested actress.” She put up her hand. “Don’t answer that. You probably do. But it’s past my bedtime.” Ceinwen stood up. “Are you glad you heard all that? You won’t feel the need to carry my groceries anymore?”

“I liked carrying your groceries. I’m glad we met.”

“I’m glad you’re satisfied.”

A hug at this point was completely out of the question, and a handshake didn’t seem the done thing with Miriam, either. She walked Ceinwen to the door and said, “Thank you again for the present.”

“You’re welcome.” Then, hesitantly, “See you around?”

“I should think so, yes.” The door closed behind her.

Ceinwen crept upstairs and went to bed, thinking she’d never sleep again. But somehow she did.

When she went to the kitchen in the morning, Jim was putting away towels, which they kept in one of the cabinets where Ceinwen supposed normal people like Miriam and Donna kept canned soup or something.

“Morning,” said Jim. “So it went well!”

“Um, yeah.”

“You sure stayed a while. Get any good Hollywood gossip?”

Ceinwen heard herself tell him, “She was a seamstress at MGM.”

“Hey, that’s kind of interesting. What did she tell you?”

“She sewed a lot of clothes.”

He waited, then said, “Okay.” He pulled a towel out of the cabinet. “Hope that was worth the scarf. Better get some coffee. You watch, today it’ll be everybody who decided overnight that your store is actually a rental place. Get ready to explain the meaning of the words ‘final sale.’”

“Thanks for the towels. I think it was my turn, I forgot.”

“You’ve had a bad holiday, I know.” She poured herself some coffee and thought about the jewelry counter. Matthew’s face intruded, eyes fixed on her when she mentioned Mary of Modena.

“Jim, I want to ask you something.” He had his towel and clothes in his arms and his comb in his mouth, ready to make for the bathroom, and gave a grunt. “When you meet someone, do you decide in five minutes whether or not you’d want to sleep with him?”

He set the towel on the stove and took the comb out of his mouth. “You mean you
don’t
?”

Talmadge she might have shrugged off, but Jim seemed definitive. “No, I don’t.”

“It takes a while to fall in love. Sometimes. But either I can imagine doing the deed right away, or I can’t.”

“That’s what Miriam said.”

Jim picked his stuff back up and said through the comb, “Uh-huh. Clothes, and sex. Me and Talmadge should have tagged along.”

She wasn’t going to tell him yet, nor Talmadge. It wasn’t as though she could show them anything. The film was gone. Hadn’t anyone ever tried to find it?

O
NE
S
UNDAY NIGHT SHE CAME HOME FROM WORK AND THE APARTMENT
was silent, though down the hall she could see the lights in the living room. She found Jim and Talmadge on the floor, Talmadge on a cushion and Jim on the bare boards next to him, their arms around each other. She’d never seen them do that. She knelt next to Talmadge.

“Stefan died,” said Jim.

She put a hand on Talmadge’s back, then took it away. He wasn’t huggy, especially not with girls.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “He’s in a better place.” She didn’t believe it, and she knew Talmadge of all people didn’t believe it either, but she said it, because it was what people had said to her.

“Must be,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of friends there.”

“I’ll make some tea,” said Jim. “I think we’ve still got some oregano.” He went into the kitchen while Ceinwen sat close to Talmadge, and neither of them said anything else.

The Gay Men’s Health Crisis paid for the funeral. It was on a Friday, a big sales day at the store. Lily speculated about whether or not funerals really helped anybody, since the guest of honor was dead. Talmadge told her that he was going, and if she thought she could replace him that day and all the days that followed with someone who sold as many old, used clothes as he did, she had his permission to find out. Lily let him go, and when Ceinwen found the nerve to say she wanted to go too, to her amazement, Lily rolled her eyes and said all right.

A couple of dozen people gathered in the small funeral home. It only took an hour. Talmadge got up and spoke about going from door to door just past dawn in Brighton Beach, trying to find someone who spoke English and would let him use the phone, and even though they hadn’t talked in weeks, Stefan’s was the only number he thought of calling.

When they came home the light was flashing on the answering machine. The first message was Talmadge’s mother, calling to ask how the funeral went and if there was anything she could do.

Short silence began the second message. Then, “Ah, yes. This is Matthew.” Pause. “Calling for Ceinwen.” Pause. “I was”—pause—“thinking perhaps we could talk.” He left his number, which she had memorized ages ago. The recording clicked off.

“I’m hanging up my coat now,” said Talmadge.

Jim still stood there. “Do you think he broke up with Anna?”

“No,” she said, and pushed erase on the machine.

They worried that Talmadge might want to drink again, but he came home every night at the normal time, though he went behind his screens after only half an hour. He ate almost two pints of ice cream before bed, and complained every morning that he was going to get fat.

Somehow she saw Miriam only once. Ceinwen told her they’d have to have her over sometime soon, and Jim could cook. Miriam said she’d like that. Ceinwen didn’t think either one of them believed it was going to happen. Their conversation had made them like two people who got drunk, fooled around, realized they didn’t want to be a couple, but couldn’t figure out how to be anything else.

No one was talking much. She went to the movies almost every night, for Bette Davis, for Carole Lombard, for Howard Hawks, stretching her funds to the limit, replacing Jim and Talmadge’s voices with the ones on the screen.

Twice in ten days she came home to a note on her bed, the same words both times: “Matthew called,” and the number, once in Jim’s careful print, once in Talmadge’s flashy scrawl. Both times she picked it up and carried it to the trashcan in the kitchen, leaving it uncrumpled on top of the garbage, still legible until somebody threw in food or a coffee filter.

Harry’s books on her shelves reproached her. She’d had them since September, and he was leaving for Paris any day now. She wasn’t sure of Matthew’s schedule this semester, or when he would be at Courant. She decided to write a nice note to Harry and leave the books with the receptionist on Monday. She wondered if Harry could take a pencil and work out a proof for the odds of running into Matthew in the lobby.

She forced herself to wear an ordinary outfit, leggings and a tunic with badly placed shoulder pads that always made Jim scowl when he saw it. She put on her Doc Martens to wade through the slush, although they leaked, and blended her eyeshadow until it was barely there. If she did see him, he wasn’t going to think she had made an effort. She loaded the books into Jim’s duffel bag.

She told the Courant receptionist she was there to drop off some books for Professor Engelman, and the woman immediately picked up the phone.

“No,” protested Ceinwen, “it’s the beginning of the semester and I don’t want to bother him.”

“He went up a while ago,” she said. “I’m sure he won’t mind.” Matthew had said the receptionist was notorious around Courant for her reluctance to do anything, and Ceinwen knew the woman just didn’t want a big stack of books behind her desk. But she had trouble coming up with the right objection, and then the woman was saying, “Yes, young lady to see you, a Miss …”

“Ceinwen,” she said, giving up. She watched the floor as she lugged the books down the hall, kept her head turned away from a crowd leaving the conference room, peeked around the corner to the elevator bank, closed her eyes for a second when the doors opened. Sixth floor, Matthew’s office—door shut, lights off. What a relief, she told herself.

Courant’s best offices were on the corners, like everywhere else she supposed, and Harry had one, full of windows that looked down Fourth Street and Mercer. His desk was messy but the rest of the office was clean. Sixties-style furniture, shelves covered in math books. A whiteboard was covered with equations in Harry’s terrible handwriting; if Ceinwen squinted, they looked almost like the Chinese characters on Miriam’s wallpaper.

Harry had moved from cheek kisses to hugs, and his embrace almost lifted her off her feet. Matthew was at the Bobst library, did he know she was coming?

“No,” she said. “I haven’t seen much of him lately.”

His eyebrows stopped moving, which was as significant as when they were jumping around.

“Too bad,” he said. “Donna was here about an hour ago. She’ll be sorry she missed you.”

He stacked the books on his desk and sat down to chat. What had she seen, anything good? Any silents? She told him about
The Torrent, The Thief of Baghdad, The Wind
.

“Seastrom! Oh, that one’s marvelous.” They talked about Lillian Gish. The greatest silent actress of them all, said Harry. Had she read the bit in King Vidor’s book, about filming the death scene in
La Bohème
? Had she seen that one yet? And Gish’s mad scene in
The Wind
, genius. “You know who really loves
The Wind
? Andy. He has a beautiful old poster of it. Rolled up, in a tube. Can you believe it? He buys this stuff and he never looks at it!”

“Do you think he might show it to me sometime?”

“He didn’t show it to me, he just bragged about it. But then he’s never invited me to his apartment. That’s where he has all the movie stuff. Here at Courant, we’re his math storage area. You should see his office.” He stopped. “In fact, why don’t you.”

“I don’t want to disturb him.”

Harry’s big frame was almost prancing to the door, like a kid on the stairs on Christmas morning. “He isn’t there. He’s never there. And this is one of the seven wonders of Courant. The others being the view from the thirteenth floor coffee room, the computer lab, Tom Savini’s corduroy jacket, although some people say he’s got two and rotates them, Dennis Antonik’s handlebar mustache …” He beckoned madly and kept talking as Ceinwen followed.